In a typical marketplace, a large number of potential customers, clients or other consumers are available for buying or otherwise acquiring vendible goods and/or services. The pool of potential consumers may include all persons as well as public and private corporations, partnerships, governmental organizations, and other such entities.
Vendible goods and/or services can span an equally large domain and may include anything from impulse purchase of items such as small candy bars to more methodically and rationally thought out acquisitions of financial instruments (e.g., home mortgages, loan refinancing packages) and/or of high-priced transportation vehicles (e.g., cars, trucks, airplanes, etc.) and/or of other properties or services.
A vendor of highly sophisticated goods and/or services (e.g., luxury automobiles with attached loan or leasing packages) will not want to waste time, energy, and money reaching out to a person who is merely looking to acquire a candy bar. Instead, the high-end vendor would like to acquire a short list pointing to motivated prospective consumers whose financial and geographic attributes indicate they may be ready to soon close on a deal for the vendor's goods and/or services. This way, the vendor may direct his or her marketing energies to the best prospects rather than wasting those energies on a more diffuse target audience.
A leads-providing industry has grown around the developing of short lists identifying optimally-ready and prospective consumers for various goods and/or services. The industry may be vertically divided into a plurality of interlinked layers including: (a) a leads generation layer, (b) a leads selling layer, (c) a leads buying layer, and (d) a leads exploitation or converting layer where, for the last layer, purchased leads are followed through on in hopes of converting the leads into consummated vendor-consumer transactions (i.e., purchases of vendor offered goods and/or services).
A variety of methods have been developed for originating leads and for conveying those leads up the vertically integrated leads market, from the originators to the ultimate purchasers and users of those leads, namely, the vendors (or vendor representatives) who wish to convert a large percentage of bought leads into actual consumer-vendor transactions.